Learning generalizable device placement algorithms for distributed machine learning
Name
1124766986-MIT.pdf
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3.64 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6fdfafdc5123a82d5b4d860010b3179a
Author(s)
Addanki, Ravichandra.
Advisor(s)
Mohammad Alizadeh.
Date Issued
2019
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
We present Placeto, a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to efficiently find device placements for distributed neural network training. Unlike prior approaches that only find a device placement for a specific computation graph, Placeto can learn generalizable device placement policies that can be applied to any graph. We propose two key ideas in our approach: (1) we represent the policy as performing iterative placement improvements, rather than outputting a placement in one shot; (2) we use graph embeddings to capture relevant information about the structure of the computation graph, without relying on node labels for indexing. These ideas allow Placeto to train efficiently and generalize to unseen graphs. Our experiments show that Placeto requires up to 6.1 x fewer training steps to find placements that are on par with or better than the best placements found by prior approaches. Moreover, Placeto is able to learn a generalizable placement policy for any given family of graphs, which can then be used without any retraining to predict optimized placements for unseen graphs from the same family. This eliminates the large overhead incurred by prior RL approaches whose lack of generalizability necessitates re-training from scratch every time a new graph is to be placed.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 47-50).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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